Re: Hopefully last draft of AL

At 06:28 AM 9/22/00 -0400, Ben Tilly wrote:
>                   THE ARTISTIC LICENSE
>               VERSION 2,  SEPTEMBER 2000

Given how this looks, I'm tempted to put forth the alternative license:

"The contents of this archive, except for packages in the ext/ directory 
explicitly marked otherwise, are placed into the public domain."

But I can see how that might not fly... :)

There is one clause I have some issues with, and that's this one:

>  1.4) Intermediate states of the programs and libraries in this
>    Package during operation shall fall under the copyrights of
>    this License if that is possible after reviewing all
>    applicable licenses, agreements, and laws.  In particular
>    binary images produced using "undump", snapshoting internal
>    byte code, or other methods of taking a snapshot of the state
>    during operation are likely to  be derivative works to which
>    this License applies.

The "likely" bit is going to give lawyers fits, but that's a minor problem. 
If we're going to claim this, we need to draw an explicit line between the 
insides and the outsides of the program. There's likely to be very little 
difference between the internal and external states in a bunch of places. 
We really can't claim ownership or license coverage for the bytecode 
emitted by the bytecode compiler.

This also has a number of interesting implications for perl, since the 
internals are moving to a more modular architecture. This clause, for 
example, would mean that if someone wrote a module that took the output 
from the optimizer and spat out Java bytecode without having the optimizer 
output frozen to disk we would own the output. I don't think we really mean 
that, nor do I think we really want to draw a stark line between output 
produced by code provided with the main distribution and output provided by 
code linked in after the fact.

Are we *sure* we don't want to throw the whole ball 'o wax into the public 
domain? :-)

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
[email protected]                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk